1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems for generating composite characters from a combination of basic characters or strokes.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Writing in ideographic based languages, such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese, requires that the writer must have a working knowledge of several thousand ideographs. Ideographs express concepts analogous to words in Western languages. Thus, writing in ideographic languages is idea oriented as contrasted with the phonetic alphabetical systems of Western languages. The large number of ideographs necessary for a writing knowledge of Japanese, Korean and Chinese requires greater skill to typewrite text than with Western languages. Heretofore, attempts to produce a low cost, easy to use ideographic based typewriter have not been successful because of the requirement that thousands of ideographs must be readily selectable from the keyboard.
It is known that composite ideographic characters may be generated by the selective placement of radicals (basic characters) within areas of a layout which divides a display screen or a given section of the display screen of the display device on which the characters are generated into two or more areas. It is also known that one of the plurality of areas of a layout may be further subdivided by inclusion (nesting) of another layout having two or more areas within that area to subdivide the area into two or more additional parts within which basic characters may be placed. Prior art references pertaining to this technique are: (1) "An Interactive System for Chinese Character Generation and Retrieval" by Shi-kuo Chang, IEEE Transactions on Systems and Cybernetics, Vol. SMC-3, No. 3, May 1973; (2) National Bureau of Standards Technical Note 254, issued January 4, 1965 on "The Pictorial Structure of Chinese Characters" by B. Kirk Rankin, III, Walter A. Sillars and Robert W. Hsu; (3) National Bureau of Standards Technical Note 296, "A Grammar for Component Combination in Chinese characters", by B. Kirk Rankin, III, Stephanie Siegel and Ann McClelland of the Center for Computer Sciences and Technology, Institute for Applied Technology, National Bureau of Standards and James L. Tan, George Washington University; (4) National Bureau of Standards Technical Note 492, issued February 1970, "Component Combination and Frame Embedding in Chinese Character Grammar", by Kirk Rankin and James L. Tan; and (5) IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 17, No. 7, December 1974, "Interactive Ideographic System", by I. M. Miller, M. N. Shen and R. C. Shen. None of the aforementioned publications discloses a complete implementation of a system for generating composite characters by the placement of basic characters within selected areas of basic layouts. Moreover, the aforementioned prior art references do not disclose the usage of compression coefficients or any other specific technique for the placement of basic characters within areas of basic layouts.